Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) and Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) keep things simmering in today's visit to the bespoke EMEA news kitchen.
U.K. incumbent BT has clinched a juicy £45 million (US$70 million), seven-year managed services deal with Asian brokerage CLSA. BT's Unified Trading system for trading communications forms the heart of the agreement, along with firewall services, application optimization, device management and maintenance. (See BT Sees Results From Its Vertical Leap.)
Amdocs is to deliver and integrate a new inventory management system for Virgin Media Inc. (Nasdaq: VMED). The new Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) system is designed to help the U.K. cable operator improve its network planning, design and assurance, so reducing order fallouts, shortening outages and avoiding network congestion. (See Virgin Media Deploys Amdocs OSS.)
The European Commission wants to make access to public data easier and cheaper, a move that, it believes, could enhance (among other things) smartphone applications and boost the region's annual trade by tens of billions of euros, reports Reuters.
The BBC has tweaked its popular iPlayer TV catch-up service so that it can run on 3G networks, though initially it will only be available on Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) devices, reports ... oh, the BBC! An analyst quoted in the story fears some bill-shock could be heading users' way.
Ascom , the Sweden-based wireless systems vendor, has opened a test center at the Mera Networks Inc. labs in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Mera will provide a range of equipment testing services. (See Ascom Opens Russian Test Center.)
Orange France has launched a "Fibre Pro" service, offering 100Mbit/s broadband to small businesses, with prices starting at €69 ($91) per month.